Tag Archives: NASA

Good news! ESA’s (European Space Agency) robotic lander Philae finally received enough solar radiation and now is out of hibernation. On the Rosetta blog, the ESA announced that “The signals were received at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt at 22:28 CEST on 13 June. More than 300 data packets have been analyzed by the teams at the Lander Control Center at the German Aerospace Center (DLR).” It is the first contact with the spacecraft since going into hibernation in November.

According to the agency, “Philae ‘spoke’ with its team on the ground for 85 seconds, via Rosetta.”

There’s a super crappy 1982 science-fiction movie named “The man who saves the world”. The story is absurd – in the opening, a narrator speaks a lot. He tells about somebody attacking on Earth, but a layer made by human brains (?) is protecting our planet. Then the battle begins: two space cadets of the world get shot in the space, crash-land on a desert planet, where an evil wizard seeks the ultimate power to take over the world. Although the movie borrows some background footage from Star Wars, the plot is mostly unrelated.

If a movie is bad then you should not watch it at all. But if a movie is really, really bad then it makes more fun than a good movie. This is one of those movies, called B-movies. Perhaps this is a C-movie.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) celebrates 50 years of spacewalking, or Extravehicular Activity (EVA) with a slogan: “#SuitUp”. The United States government agency, which responsible for the civilian space program as well as aeronautics and aerospace research, will be celebrating accomplishments throughout the year 2015.

When I was a child, I always dreamed about watching Earth from the space. Back in the 1980s, we were almost sure that around the year 2000, the space travel would be so common. Remember TV shows like “Space: 1999”. Unfortunately, the space race lost its momentum during the 1990s and 2000s.

But thanks to the Internet and computer science, we all able to see the earth from the space. And live! And HD! 24 hours a day (the feed will sometimes go down as the signal switches between the cameras – the screen is grey when the cameras are down)!

On December 24, 1968, the crew of Apollo 8, the second human spaceflight mission in the US Apollo space program, were the first humans to witness Earthrise. The “Earthrise” is photographed by astronauts on board Apollo 8. It is one of the most famous photos ever taken and became the symbol of one the greatest explorations in history: human’s first journey to another world, and when the crewmembers looked back, they saw their home planet.

Since the “space age” has started in the early 1960s, astronauts have taken more than 1.8 million photographs of the Earth from orbit, and about one-third of them (approximately 600,000) have been taken at night. But they don’t always know what they are looking at. You can help, announced NASA.

The farthest spacecraft from Earth, NASA’s Voyager 1 Notes 1 probe took a photo of planet Earth in 1990, from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40 AU) from Earth. The photo is known as the Pale Blue Dot. In the photograph, Earth is shown as a fraction of a pixel (0.12 pixel in size) against the vastness of space. It was a part of the solar system Family Portrait series of images.

The Voyager 1 spacecraft, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of Carl Sagan Notes 2.